Word: came
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...rivals, no crises, no questions. Sure, our Tamagachis died on us, our Pogs collections failed to impress on the playground, and our responsibly homemade lunches never did quite compare to the cool kids with the Dunkaroos and Lunchables. But the decade presented no problems that seemed unsolvable. Then came the aughts, in which the stability, safety, and simplicity of the ’90s was flipped on its head. The facades of our failed institutions were torn down, revealing one sham after another—the dotcom crash, the housing crisis, Enron, Katrina...
Entering such a setting as an outside observer provides a new perspective on the apparent ridiculousness of some status-determining customs in a closed system. Exam questions at St. Stephen’s, for instance, came from a short list approved 20 years ago by the central University of Delhi administration: Students pre-prepared long strands of factual regurgitation by photocopying and memorizing past students’ answers. But even more than a custom’s ridiculousness, the outside perspective allows one to synthesize the way in which an insider glimpses such ridiculousness and yet works within the rules...
...When they came in 1940, there were waiters and crystal in the dining halls,” Betty Petschek said about her husband’s class. “That changed when World War II started...
Harvard had dreams before you came. It dreamt of colonizing Allston with merciless engineering concentrators. It dreamt of building a science center out of stem cells. If you had not shown up, Harvard could have been a colder version of Stanford by now. But you did, Fortuna got angry, and now our red-spiced chicken is a little less spiced...
During the course of the past year, Widener also came to be the temple of my thesis. The ritual of writing always began with a visit to the replica of Harry Elkins’s home reading room between the first and second floors. As I would cross the threshold of the marble antechamber, I breathed deeply that distinct change in smell, the sweetness evocative of aged pages, and felt the cooler, quieter atmosphere envelope me. In that life’s heart of the library, there the Gutenberg would light up before me, there Harry’s portrait...